PubCrawl Podcast: Publishing 201 The Anatomy of a Query Letter

This week Kelly and JJ go into a little more detail about how to write a query: what works, what doesn’t work, the who, the what, the where, and the whys. Also, have a query you want to have critiqued? Email us!

Unfortunately, it appears as though our iTunes link is broken due to us moving the podcast to Soundcloud to deal with server issues. We are looking to see if we can’t maintain the feed at its current place, but we may need to delete the podcast and y’all who listen through iTunes to resubscribe. Our apologies in advance!

Try to limit the number of characters you’re naming in your query (they generally say no more than 3): the protagonist, the antagonist, major ancillary character

Also, you may write a flawless query, but the agent may still pass because it’s simply not their taste

The “Formula”

SETUP: A brief “laying of the scene”: setting, premise, etc. The “status quo”, as it were.INCITING INCIDENT: A disruption of the status quo (e.g. a stranger comes to town)CONSEQUENCES OF INCITING INCIDENT: How the world has changed after the Inciting IncidentTHE MOMENT THE PROTAGONIST BECOMES PERSONALLY INVOLVED: What it says on the tin

All of this together gets across what the stakes are, and that’s what generates tension and interest in a story.

ALSO: If you need troubleshooting with your query, Kelly and JJ will be doing QUERY CRITIQUES in a future podcast. If you have a query you would like us to critique, email us at publishingcrawl@gmail.com with the subject line PUBCRAWL PODCAST QUERY CRITIQUE. We will we critiquing 5 queries with all identifying information removed. All genres and categories welcome! We will leave the query critique submission open for 4 weeks, so polish up and send it in!

This is the first time I’ve heard someone likes writing queries :). After this podcast finished I re-worked my query and I still feel it reads as ‘average.’ I’m submitting my query for one of your critiques and hope you can help make it better. Thank you.

Do we take an actual query letter and send it to you? The reason I ask is because some posts recommend making the first paragraph of the letter more personal (if possible), so my first paragraph would look different depending on who the recipient is. Or are you just wanting the meat of the query letter, where we give a brief blurb of our story?

If you send us the whole query letter we will not read the personal, identifying sections aloud on the podcast. But we may still be able to give you feedback on those sections, either by skipping over a few details but reading the non-identifying parts, or by speaking generally about the personal section. We can work with either a complete query or just the meat, as you say.